Recent net stats oddity with Wheezy KVM sessions
In the past month or two, I have consistently encountered an odd problem with
Wheezy on an AMD 8350 CPU. I never had this problem with my quad Phenom-II.
The problem
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When I install recent builds of 32- and 64-bit Smoothwall Express 3.1 in a KVM
on 64-bit Wheezy, everything seems to work well. Except for one thing.
Smoothwall has a program that collects interface byte & packet peg counts from
iptACCOUNT and possibly directly from netfilter every two seconds. The
bandwidthbars and trafficmonitor UI pages are supposed to display the current
bit rate. This problem makes the displayed rates climb very slowly and fall
glacially. Also, the interfaces are weird. I've seen it display 170Mb/s
throughput through a 100Mb/s NIC, and at least 1.9Gb/s through a physical gigE
LAN. And no transmit/receive errors appear on any NIC's ifconfig output.
It happens on kernel 3.2, 3.12 and 3.14. It happens with Wheezy's kvm() and
with qemu 1.7.x built from scratch. It happens with emulated e1000 NICs and
with virtio.
Comparison
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The exact same ISO installed on iron with a dual-core Athlon works as
expected. And it works OK in that other computer in a KVM on Squeeze. (In
fact, I NFS-mounted my KVM stuff from the desktop to this test system, so the
method is identical.)
I haven't yet tried removing the HDs from my vishera desktop and installing
the ISO directly. Or booting the Squeeze HD on the vishera. Or trying a
different distro. Or even installing Wheezy from scratch on a spare drive.
Queries
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Has anyone else seen behavior like this in KVM sessions on Wheezy? Or is it
just my recent bad luck with computers?
Where/how should I dig to narrow down the scope of the problem?
Is it possible to install older kernels, qemu/kvm and other pkgs as needed to
try to find a combination that works?
Thanks,
N
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